The sixth maze for Halloween Horror Nights 2018 is simultaneously familiar and brand-new, taking a concept originally trotted out at last year’s event and updating its contents to make for a (hopefully) fresh experience for this year.

The Horrors of Blumhouse: Chapter Two is yet another greatest-hits mash-up from the expansive and now-legendary library of Blumhouse Productions, this time exchanging out the likes of The Purge, Happy Death Day, and Sinister for the new entries of Truth or Dare and Unfriended. Yes, that’s right – the Horror Nights designers shrunk the film catalog down to just two, perhaps in an effort to maximize the narrative coherence and scares of each individual property.

But what’s perhaps even more noteworthy is how the two chosen properties are more thematically similar, with supernatural entities pursuing individuals through, at times, technological means. Truth or Dare, which only came out this past April, follows a group of college friends on a vacation to Mexico, where they’re lured into entering the ruins of an ancient mission and where they start playing – but of course – a game of alcohol-fueled truth or dare. What they come to realize too late is that the game has become possessed by a demon, who has opted to utilize the children’s activity as its preferred means of inflicting torture and pain upon those hapless humans that populate the planet; if one of the participants refuses to complete his dare – which typically revolves around injuring or outright murdering nearby individuals – he himself is killed. (The technological part of the equation comes into effect in the film’s climax, where the few remaining friends attempt to prolong their lives by opening up the game to the millions of YouTube watchers that exist around the globe.)

Unfriended (2015), meanwhile, sees another group of youths, this time in high school, become haunted by an unknown user during their Skype conversation – a medium that serves as the movie’s framing device, technically making the audience stare at a laptop screen for the entire hour-and-a-half experience (yes, that means Unfriended is a variation on the found-footage sub-genre). It eventually becomes apparent that the mysterious intruder is the tormented spirit of the group’s former friend, who committed suicide a year previously after being bullied on social media – bullying that her friends secretly had a hand in, to one degree or another. Amid the forced confessions and emotional distress that plays out during the video chat, the group is essentially hunted down one by one, being made to die in ever-more-gruesome ways.

While these similarities should make for a more well-rounded haunt experience, it’s worth noting that these do come with two potential drawbacks: the lack of variety that last year’s Horrors of Blumhouse afforded, and, much more theoretically problematic, the difficulties in realizing Unfriended in haunted-house format. As far as the latter is concerned, Universal could always opt to minimize (no pun intended) the online angle of the source material – perhaps the designers could pay homage to it by simply having a laptop wedged into every scene or so – but since this is so intrinsic to the film’s very structure, it leads to the question of whether its scares are strong enough to stand on their own, outside of its found-footage premise. We’re certainly hoping they are.

If you would like a concise-but-thorough breakdown of Blumhouse Productions’s history and its possibly-revolutionary approach to filmmaking that has made it so unbelievably successful (between just Truth or Dare and Unfriended alone, the company made $158 million worldwide against a combined budget of only $4.5 million), please see the in-depth write-up that our sister site, Orlando Informer, published when the Universal Orlando version of The Horrors of Blumhouse was first announced last year.

(And lest you forget, this isn’t the only Blumhouse love that HHN 2018 has to offer: The First Purge was revealed as the event’s third maze just last month.)

The Horrors of Blumhouse: Chapter Two will join Stranger Things, Trick ‘r Treat, The First Purge, Poltergeist, and Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers at Universal Studios Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights, which runs for 29 select nights from Friday, September 14 to Saturday, November 3.

Marc N KleinhenzMarc N. Kleinhenz’s first dream in life was to be an astronaut. His second was an Imagineer. While neither completely worked out, he now is the editor and podcast co-host for Orlando Informer. He’s also written for 32 other sites (including Screen Rant, IGN, and The Escapist), has had his fiction featured in several publications, and has even taught English in Japan. Imagineering school won’t be too far behind.